Sex, Drugs And Rock 'N Roll? Nah.

They may have come of age in the free love and drugs hippie culture of the Sixties, but many baby boomer parents are keeping a tight rein on their own kids -- snooping on their diaries, telephone calls and computers.

A limited study of middle and upper class professionals in California -- birthplace of Sixties liberalism -- found many baby boomer parents resorting to surveillance to protect their teenagers from what they see as a world plagued by gangs, AIDS, drugs and school shootings.

"Today's parents -- even those who were raised in liberal households -- are undertaking dramatic reversals from how they were brought up," said University of Southern California sociology professor Elaine Bell Kaplan, author of the study published on Tuesday.

"Boomer parents see today's culture as very worrisome. They've become very conservative about drugs because of their own experiences. They are concerned about their kids' sexual activity because of their own experiences, which they believe are magnified when it comes to their own kids," Kaplan said.

She quoted one parent in the study as saying, "If I had known it was going to be this hard, I wouldn't have had a kid."

Kaplan interviewed 30 parents from northern and southern California, most of them college-educated professionals aged between 39 and 55. Many said they neither respected nor understood the current teen culture, particularly hip-hop and its often violent lyrics, and believed the world was much safer in the 1960s.

Many parents who took part regularly invaded their teens' computers to read their e-mail, read their diaries, eavesdropped on telephone conversations or regularly searched their children's rooms.

The 1999 Columbine High School killings -- and the belief that the parents of the teen shooters should have known about their children's plans, were among the reasons for parental spying. Two teen boys shot dead 12 students and a teacher at Columbine before turning their guns on themselves in the worst incident of school violence in U.S. history.

"I guess my son didn't realize that what you look up (on the Internet) will automatically be saved," Kaplan quoted one mother as saying. "I mean it was mind boggling what he looked at. Some of the stuff was really sick."

Kaplan said one mother took a more subtle approach, specifically hugging her son when he came home late to see if he smelled of marijuana or alcohol.

She said she had started the studying with the assumption that parents who grew up in the Sixties, with its emphasis on civil rights, would be sympathetic to their children's privacy rights.

But she was wrong. "One parent who said that she was involved in women's rights during her college years admitted a little sheepishly that she too had snooped on her 14-year-old son. 'He has no rights!', she told me," Kaplan said.

Kaplan launched her study after finding little research on upper or middle class parents raising teens and that despite heated debate o parental responsibility, few studies had actually asked parents how they exercise control and protection.

© MMII Reuters Limited. All Rights Reserved